Monday, 12 July 2010

Kay Ryan's Ladder

Brit remarks under Another Good Writer Gone (below) that I read an awful lot of female novelists. It hadn't really occurred to me, but of course he's right - I do (indeed, I'm reading another right now, catching up with one of Muriel Spark's, of which perhaps more when I've finished it). Why? It's certainly nothing programmatic - it's just that (as it seems to me) for several decades now, so many of the best novelists, especially in England, have been women. I don't know why this is - perhaps the shaping of the novel by Jane Austen and Henry James somehow 'feminised' it, playing to the traditional strengths of women rather than men - psychological and emotional insight, fascination with nuances of behaviour and dialogue - or is that all stereotypical (after all James was a man)? Anyway, I realise that my predilection for female writers also extends to poetry - at least American poetry, where my recent reading has involved Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore, and another poet I discovered (like so much else for which I'm grateful) by way of Anecdotal Evidence: Kay Ryan, who recently served a stint as America's poet laureate. Here is one of hers which I keep going back to and which seems to me a marvel of compressed wisdom and perfect placing of words...

Carrying a Ladder

We are alwaysreally carryinga ladder, but it’sinvisible. Weonly knowsomething’sthe matter:something preciouscrashes; easy doorsprove impassable.Or, in the body,there’s too muchswing or off-center gravity.And, in the mind,a drunken capacity,access to out-of-rangeapples. As thoughone had a way to climbout of the damageand apology.

So simple, so true - and so in the tradition of Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore.

About Me

Nige, who, like Mr Kenneth Horne, prefers to remain anonymous, was also a founder blogger of The Dabbler and a co-blogger on the Bryan Appleyard Thought Experiments blog. He is the sole blogger on this one, and his principal aim is to share various of life's pleasures. These tend to relate to books, art, poems, butterflies, birds, churches, music, walking, weather, drink, etc, with occasional references to the passing scene.